JIM Carter didn't so much tread the boards as shuffle about on the sand in his first serious acting role. The Harrogate-born actor had appeared in a school play and quite liked it but then gone off to university in Sussex to study the law without any thoughts of a thespian career.

"In the summer holidays someone said, 'do you want to do some acting on the beach?'," he recalls. "I was a Wicked Thistle, keeping the sunshine from Little Daisy. And I thought, 'this is the game, isn't it?'.

"So I dropped out of university and joined what were called in the early 1970s arts labs or experimental theatre groups. I junked the law degree and did that for £5 a week and a sleeping bag. Pure happiness."

He appears to have lost none of his enthusiasm for the business although now, of course, he has more than Wicked Thistle on his CV with film credits including Brassed Off, Shakespeare In Love and The Madness Of King George as well as many stage and TV roles.

He's a big chap which meant that, for the early part of his career at least, size did matter.

"I used to be cast for my size and my deep voice," he says. "The one that broke the mould was The Singing Detective where I played a nice gentle person and people said, 'he doesn't have to be big and hard'."

Carter is nasty again - but in the nicest possible U-certificate kind of way - in his latest movie role, as Rookery the vampire hunter in the family film The Little Vampire.

The characters are taken from a series of best-selling children's books by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg "I have a six-year-old and she's not read them. But I gather they're big in Germany," he says.

The film stars Jonathan Lipnicki, the cute bespectacled kid from Jerry Maguire and Stuart Little, as an American boy who encounters vampires when his family moves to Scotland.

Carter says it was fairly tough making the movie, especially as many of his scenes are in his vampire-hunter vehicle. "All the stuff I do in the truck was done in a studio with big guys bouncing it up and down to make it look like it was moving," he recalls.

"That was a Russian army 1930s truck , desperately uncomfortable for a 16 stone, 6ft 2in person like me to get in to. So you are more concentrated on all the things sticking into your ribs. But you keep your sense of humour.

"We were right next door to a theme park and once every so often you would have to stop for the rollercoaster to go past."

The film had European finance and an equally mixed cast and crew which did lead to odd moments. "If English is not the first language, nuances get lost. There were odd misunderstandings but not difficulties, just to do with a lot of people not working in their first language. But it wasn't a problem really," he says.

An example of that was the hiccup over night scenes to be shot in Scotland.

No one had told the foreign production team that it doesn't get dark in Edinburgh in the summer until eleven at night. So some night scenes had to be rescheduled to be shot indoors on a sound stage in Germany.

Although Rookery is a baddy, he's not too scary as this is a family film. "I have a six-year-old and don't want to play too many perverts. I want to do things she can see," says Carter, 52, who also turned up this week in an episode of BBC1's The Scarlet Pimpernel.

He was able to see a young Hollywood star, Lipnicki, in action at close range and found him "a nice lad - he's that eccentric mixture you see in the films. He's a quirky boy and I don't mean that in a bad sense. His ambitions are to be a kung fu fighter and a basketball player."

Carter, who is married to actress Imelda Staunton, has no worries about his own daughter Bessie following in his acting footsteps as he's been having a good time in the profession.

"I've had a wonderful life. It's been a brilliant time. I married an actress who works a lot as well and we juggle our lives. It would not push my daughter toward it or against it.

"It's almost inevitable because it's the world she knows. It's her world so she might want to go into it. The only thing I might find it hard was if she wanted to do it and didn't have what it takes. But already she has timing - she can time a joke."

l The Little Vampire (U) is on release in cinemas now